It’s a short album, consisting of all-new songs (all from this year). There’s some satirical tunes, a dreamy atmospheric instrumental, and a PSA against bullying by children and adults alike. Check it out!

Well, me, really, but Voices Arising are a side project through which I can record and release more choral-type music, rather than the folky-alternative-rock stuff I do as A Montreal Paul. Here is is, then…six tracks, including two originals.

If you don’t like something and think it’s cheap, unless you really have a great sense of responsibility for your culture, I think it’s best to keep it to yourself. That might be the song that gets someone through a dark hour […] All this plumbing the culture-mongers do is quite irrelevant. If someone has the grace to write a song that touches the hearts of thousands, I think it’s a matter for applause. Or of silence, if you think the air has been polluted by a song.

According to the Guardian, where the interview appeared, Cohen was responding to Martin Amis’s critiques of Simon and Garfunkel’s music “ being not so much art as therapy and of Suzanne Vega producing a style of music that is both symptomatic of, and reinforcing, a climate of passivity and retreat.” (please note that I cannot find the original 1988 interview or any text of Amis’s critique).

What I love about this quote is not so much the dismissal of these sorts of critiques of songs, as the idea that a song can “get someone through a dark hour”, can touch people’s hearts, and that this is the most important thing when it comes to considering their significance. My songs have certainly reached nowhere near as many people as those of Cohen, Paul Simon or Suzanne Vega, but the nicest thing anyone ever said about my songs is that some of them helped her through a rough time. I hope my songs and words will reach more people and help them with whatever inspiration, healing, or venting they need at a given time.

I think it’s safe to say that, despite the ethos of “do what you love” (nice work if you can get it) most people in this world don’t work for fun. They work to pay the bills. Unfortunately, well-paid, secure work is not easy to come by and so many work hard and still struggle:

The money goes out, the bills come inRound and round we go againI come close but I never winStuck On The Treadmill

The narrator of this song is a steel worker. As Karl Marx would put it, he is “alienated” from his work, yet he knows of no other way to make a living:

Another day of punching steelTill my arm’s too numb to feelLike a hamster on a wheelStuck On The Treadmill

Is this living?

Wish I knew a better wayTo keep myself aliveShaking sheets of metalEvery day from 9 to 5Others may be livingBut me, I just survive

Automation is changing the face of industry. Robots are taking on the most dangerous and tedious jobs. In a decent society this would be cause for celebration. Instead, it is cause for fear:

Me and the robot working awayHe looks at me, as if to say“I’ll be doing your job some day”Stuck On The Treadmill

Thompson’s steel worker goes on to describe how workers are unceremoniously laid off en masse (“twenty years and they show you the door”) and strikes and conflict ensue while the town suffers:

Strike’s coming, trouble’s brewingWhole town going to rack and ruinNext year, what’ll I be doing?Stuck On The Treadmill

What’s the alternative to the treadmill? To too many, it is an abyss, nothing more. What else can I do?

People often resent those they think are “benefiting from the system” more than them, collecting welfare, receiving services as refugees newly admitted to a country where they have no right to work and often don’t even speak the language well, and so on. But I think the source of the problem is people feeling trapped on the treadmill yet fearing being thrown off it. They say “I’m working a job I hate and am barely getting by, so why are these people getting something for not working?” For them, the fact that they still have a job makes them a productive member of society and a source of pride even though they hate their work, so that at least makes them better than those who don’t work, who are either “taking advantage of the system” or left on the scrapheap.

How can we change work, and our attitudes about it? Not an easy question to answer, I know.